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SkyPrep

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5 Training Tips When Using SkyPrep

By Sep Barkhodaee, August 16, 2013

As a leading online training software provider, we at SkyPrep want to make sure that all of our users are getting the most of out of our platform. Anyone can pick up SkyPrep and start to create courses online within minutes, but below I list five suggestions to ensure you’re creating the most effective training for your employees, trainees, students or otherwise.

Let’s jump right into it.

1 – Group your users appropriately to make tracking simple.

If there are commonalities between your trainees, create groups (e.g. Marketing Department, New Hires, etc.) and organize users accordingly. This makes it easier to manage and track trainees in clusters as opposed to individually. You can assign courses to groups so that once you add a person to a particular group, they will automatically be enrolled into all courses associated to that group. Then, Group Reports allow you to track and compare group members to one another.

Also keep in mind that you can assign a single user to more than one group.

Within a course, often times it is important that your users progress through the course items in the order that you outlined. To do this, enable the Force Order option found in your Course Settings (under More Options). Force Order ensures that users don’t jump from item to item randomly, and that they actually complete the item before moving onto the next. It also forces users to watch videos in full before being able to move on.

On top of the Force Order feature, you can create learning paths across various courses using our Course Pre-req feature. For example, if you create the courses Sales 101, Sales 201 and Sales 301, you can enroll trainees into all three courses at the same time, but access to 201 will not be granted until the user has passed 101 and access to 301 will not be granted until the user has passed 201.

This works exactly as you need, and I would strongly suggest using both of these features if you want trainees to learn content in a specific order.

3 – Use Short Answer tests as assignments.

Tests and quizzes created in SkyPrep are all auto-marked, unless they include Short Answer questions. These essay style questions require the admin to grade the question before the learner can view their results. So with that said, if in the middle of a course you want a user to submit a short answer or essay type assignment, create an “exam” that includes a single short-answer question. When users submit their response, you will be prompted to assign a grade to their written assignment.

Many users find this to be a very effective way to see how trainees are progressing beyond ABCD type tests.

When putting together a course or exam, always remember to mix it up and use different mediums and question types to create a more engaging learning experience. For your learning documents, include videos, PowerPoints, and audio files When creating your tests, include different question types – some multiple choice, some true/false, some fill-in-the-blanks etc.

When you do this, learners are always being challenged and engaged in different ways and the course doesn’t become tedious or cumbersome. Also remember that different people learn most effectively in various ways. Check out our Learning Styles blog to read more about which personality types are more conducive to various learning styles.

5 – Create follow-up courses months after.

When trainees finish a course, you want to be sure that they really have absorbed the material being taught to them. To ensure this, you need to have a strategy in place that lets you know how effective your training course was, and whether it actually lead to a more productive employee. A follow-up course to see how users score on tests or quizzes months after passing the course will be a nice, tangible way of gauging employee understanding.